Hasta La Gadget!

Not to denigrate the numerous fine hacks that Kinect‘s undergone since its launch, but it’s always nice to see the professionals come in and shake things up a little. A crew from MIT‘s brain labs has put together a hand detection system on Microsoft’s ultra-versatile cam, which is sophisticated enough to recognize the position of both your palms and fingers. Just as a demonstration, they’ve tied that good stuff up to a little picture-scrolling UI, and you won’t be surprised to hear that it’s the closest thing to Minority Report‘s interactive gesture-based interface that we’ve seen yet. And it’s all achieved with a freaking console peripheral. Video after the break.

Continue reading Kinect finally fulfills its Minority Report destiny (video)

Kinect finally fulfills its Minority Report destiny (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Kotaku  |  MITCSAIL (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments

Every night we go to bed thinking that we’ve finally seen the best Kinect hack done and every morning we wake up to see something even crazier concocted with Microsoft’s motion controller. Today, it’s been mounted atop a quadrocopter — yes, man’s future worst enemy — and utilized essentially as a 3D radar, facilitating the bot’s autonomous maneuvering around a predetermined track. The random introduction of obstacles is also handled in stride, leaving us equal parts impressed, apprehensive, and eager for more. See the video after the break.

[Thanks, Glen]

Continue reading Kinect turned into a quadrocopter radar (video)

Kinect turned into a quadrocopter radar (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  pbouf77 (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments

You’ve seen so many Kinect hacks by now that you probably think you know them all — but wait, have you seen one that makes you look like Predator when he’s busy predatorizing the populace? Or one that lets you reenact your favorite Metal Gear Solid scenes with Snake’s camo turned on? Yup, a Japanese coder by the name of Takayuki Fukatsu has exploited the versatile openFrameworks to give Kinect a mode where it tracks your movement and position, but turns the dull details of your visage into an almost perfectly transparent outline. Of course, you’re not actually transparent, it looks to be just the system skinning an image of the background onto the contours of your body in real time, but man, it sure is cool to look at. You can do so for yourself with the video after the break.

Continue reading Kinect now offers a stealth mode, courtesy of optical camouflage hack (video)

Kinect now offers a stealth mode, courtesy of optical camouflage hack (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Geek.com, Neowin, PopSci  |  TakayukiFukatsu (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments

Remember the cloaking device effect used in the original Predator movie? The effect allowed the many-mouthed man-hunter from beyond the moon to cloak itself into its background. It was all the buzz of the late 1980s cinema. Now you can achieve basically that same effect with the Microsoft Kinect home gaming system.

This home-brewed digital invisibility cloak comes courtesy of Takayuki Fukatsu. According to his YouTube channel, he constructed the hack using openFrameworks, an open source C++ coding toolkit, however he holds back on the exact deets used to achieve the effect.

Making yourself invisible to the Xbox probably isn’t the most useful function in the world, but it is an impressive piece of techno-doodling. It’s also telling of how far we’ve come technologically that anyone can recreate an effect in their living room that was Hollywood state-of-the-art just 20 years ago. It’s also another example of Kinect-o-tinkering that tech-minded folk have found for Microsoft’s cool new toy.

via PopSci

As we mentioned this morning, Microsoft has managed to move more than 2.5 million Kinect units in the first 25 days that the product has been on sale. To put that into perspective, that’s roughly twice the current rate of iPad sales.

Breaking things down, 2.5 million in 25 days is around 100,000 units a day. It took 60 days, meanwhile, for the iPad to sell its first two million units. Apple has sold three million iPads in the device’s first 80 days and is expected to sell 4.5 million in the device’s first quarter. That breaks down to 50,000 a day–half of Kinect’s current rate.

Back in September, a Microsoft exec predicted that Kinect sales would dwarf those of the iPad, “The preorders have been really strong. As far as what we’re looking at for Holiday, this is going to be stuff that’ll blow away any of the sales you’ve seen with iPad.”

The Kinect is doing gangbusters, certainly, but there are a few things to take into account here–the comparison isn’t really apples to apples. For one thing, Kinect starts at $150–the iPad starts at $500 (and goes all the way up to $800). Also, Microsoft got an early boost from Black Friday sales.

Then there’s the fact that the Kinect had a built-in audience when it launched: Xbox 360 users. Apple, on the other hand, had to convince users that they ought to be interested in a space that they had long ignored.

All said, it looks to be a pretty solid holiday season for Microsoft and Apple alike.